


Pineapple Knots

by sanguinity



Category: Hornblower (TV), Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Birthday Presents, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-16 20:30:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18698614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: Loosely-related moments from a modern-AU relationship: one crushing disappointment and two birthdays.





	1. A Crushing Disappointment

**Author's Note:**

> These were all prompts from Discord and tumblr, and were originally posted there.
> 
> A pineapple knot is a variant of the turkshead knot, wherein two colors are used to create a pineapple-like pattern.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HMS Pouty was having a very bad day, and asked for something sweet and comforting.

Horatio was deep into narrating his interim decision to sail the _Hotspur_ gaff-rigged, when he noticed that Will wasn't listening any more, distracted by opening his mail. Horatio felt a flash of irritation at being ignored, even though he knew he prattled about the little salvaged boat more than anyone could possibly want to listen, even Will. 

But Will was usually so generous about listening, asking questions as if he actually cared about Horatio's obsessions… It was difficult for Horatio to give up that keen attention, however unreasonable it might be to expect it in the first place. 

But Will was more than just distracted, Horatio realised as he turned his attention to his friend. There was something too fixed in Will's manner as he read his letter. Quite a short letter, from what Horatio could see — certainly not long enough to require this much rigid attention. 

Then Horatio's stomach sank, as he realised what the letter must be. "Is that Tamouth?" 

Will grimaced, all bitterness and disappointment. "Yes." 

Cautiously, Horatio reached out to take the letter; Will let him have it. Only a few short lines: Will had not been accepted into the program. They cordially wished him the best, and invited him to try again next year. 

Horatio bit his lip, trying to figure out what to say. "I'm sorry," he eventually settled on, although it seemed grossly inadequate. Tamouth had the best therapist training program in the country; Will went on about it nearly as much Horatio went on about the _Hotspur._

"You could still try for City," Horatio said, and Will's face said exactly what he thought of that suggestion. Horatio hadn't actually expected it to offer much consolation: City was perfectly adequate in its way, but it didn't touch the paradigm-defining work they were doing at Tamouth. Horatio had never heard passion from Will when he talked about City, not like he felt about Tamouth. 

Horatio handed the letter back; Will took it and refolded it into its original thirds, and again the other way. He slid it into his back pocket. Tried to smile, and failed. "I can always reapply next year." 

"Yes," Horatio said, and wished he had something better to offer. "Let me take you out tonight. We'll be fancy, I'll take you up to the hotel." The hotel on the bluff was grander than either of them could normally afford, but this was Will, and he'd been eager about Tamouth for the better part of a year. 

Will laughed, a sad, bitter sound. "The hotel? You don't have to, mate." But then, when Horatio insisted: "Yeah, that'd be… That'd be fun." His smile suggested no such thing, however, and Horatio hunched his shoulders against his own inadequacy. 

"Two of those," Horatio said after they'd been seated in the dark, wood-panelled bar, pointing at a flaming drink being served to the next table. The waiter serving them was making a grand show of it, swooping the glasses through the air until they trailed flame behind them. The bar seemed to be full of people celebrating one thing or another. As near as Horatio could tell, he and Will were the only ones mourning something. 

"On fire, just like my future," Will said, after the pageantry with the flaming drinks had been performed for them, and the beverage set before him. Horatio thanked and tipped the waiter. 

"You can sit the entrance exams again. I'll help you revise," Horatio offered, and Will moaned, clearly not comforted by the offer. 

"It'll be all right, Will. One way or another. You'll..." But Will didn't seem convinced, and Horatio didn't know how to make it not sound like an empty platitude. Desperate, Horatio stole Will's straw, paired it with his own, folded them each in half, and stuck them up his nostrils. That shocked laughter out of Will, and face flaming, Horatio yanked the straws out before anyone else could see. 

"You're a good friend, Aitch," Will said, still laughing, and through his mortification, Horatio felt shyly pleased that he had gotten Will to laugh. 

It was not the most successful evening Horatio had ever had, but he thought he was doing well enough at cheering Will up, until, over the dregs of his fifth flaming coffee, Will had a sudden crash of spirits. "Not even the waiting list," he said, hunched in misery. "They're brilliant at Tamouth, why would they even want me?" 

Horatio flailed at the wrongness of that. "Because you're brilliant, Will," he said, and when that seemed to have no effect, he dragged his chair around the table, closer to Will. "You're brilliant, and we'll make them see that." He reached out to touch Will's shoulder, a comforting pat between mates, and suddenly found himself with an armful of drunken Will. 

Horatio froze, Will's face buried in his shoulder, unsure what to do. But Will didn't seem to be going anywhere — and in truth Horatio didn't want him to go anywhere — and so Horatio carefully put his arms around Will, and when that seemed to go all right, patted his back, the movement becoming more natural as he went. 

"You're brilliant, Will. Passionate, and dedicated, and determined. You'll apply again next year, and if they still don't see your worth, you'll make your own path. You'll figure it out." He turned his face into Will's hair, and for a moment, lost in his own drunken haze, simply reveled in having his arms full of Will. Splendid Will, so full of all the virtues Horatio lacked. With a start, he remembered his role for the evening. "You'll figure it out," he said again, earnestly, trying to make up for his lapse. "I'll help, if you like." 

Will pulled back far enough to see Horatio's face, and Horatio's side felt cold with the loss. "You mean that?" He couldn't quite hold his head up, and leaned it against Horatio's arm. 

"That you're brilliant? Yeah." Horatio was nothing but a swell of tender feeling for Will. 

"That you'll help?" Will clarified. 

"Of course." 

Will smiled, the sunniest Horatio had seen him all evening. "Can't fail, then." 

Horatio felt himself blush to the tips of his ears, and blamed it on the alcohol. He looked down, away, back at Will: Will was still beaming at him. 

"One more, or shall I take you home?" Horatio asked. 

"Home," Will said and crashed himself into Horatio's arms again, this time in a hug. Horatio clung to him, at first to avoid being bowled off his own chair, and then simply for the pleasure of hugging Will. 

"It'll be all right," he said into Will's hair. He hugged Will tight, and felt Will hug him in return. "You'll figure it out, I promise."


	2. Ikea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mothdads prompted: "How about modern day au bush having to rescue hornblower from an ikea store after he gets inextricably lost trying to find new drawer pulls"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on tumblr](https://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/183732096513/mothdads-prompted-on-discord-how-about-modern).

_“There_  you are,” Will says, and Horatio blindly reaches behind himself, his eyes still fixed on the display of drawer pulls in front of him. A second later Will clasps his hand, his fingers closing as smoothly around Horatio’s as if they had no other purpose in the world, and then Will is at his side, warm and steady, the antithesis of the bewildering array of crazy that surrounds them. “I thought the store had eaten you,” Will continues. “How the hell did you manage to get lost in an Ikea?”

“I wasn’t lost,” Horatio protests, because of course he wasn’t. He had stopped to look at drawer pulls. The display furniture upstairs had boasted a confusing array of configurations – he had gone half-mad trying to sort out what the options for a given piece of furniture even were, let alone trying to choose among the unknown possibilities. And then he’d found the display of all the different kinds of drawer pulls, which had made sense of at least that much.

Except were these all the different kinds? He frowned, trying to remember what he had seen in his tour of the upper level.

“There’s a path,” Will scolds, still talking as if it was Horatio who had been lost. But Horatio had only stopped where he was standing; it was Will who had wandered on and gotten himself lost. “All you have to do is follow the path.”

“H'mm,” Horatio agrees, still scowling at the display. Most selections come in a choice of brass, chrome, black, or white. Except the leather pulls, which are a light buff with chrome fittings. The leather pulls are hideous; he can’t imagine who might think they are a good idea. Perhaps he should choose a color first, and that would help him select a style.

“God, those leather ones are hideous,” Will says, reaching out to touch the offending item, and Horatio can’t help but smile: Will has very correct opinions. It’s not obviously clear whether Will is meant to grasp the loops or put his fingers in them, and that’s another stroke against the design: Will’s hands are capability made corporeal, and any object that manages to make him look incompetent is a crime against both man and nature.

A few seconds later, Will whispers in his ear, “Are you satisficing or optimizing?”

Horatio winces with sudden guilt. He had promised Will that he would satisfice – there were far, far too many possibilities in the store to choose among, and so little basis on which to make a choice. Satisficing is the only sensible strategy. And yet the urge to make the  _right_  choice, as elusive as it may be, is inescapable.

Will laughs and squeezes his hand. “I thought so. Here, let me…” He reaches out, hesitates briefly over the globular black Bagganäs – why oh why is it a different shape than the brass Bagganäs? – and comes back with a two-pack of the black Eneryda.

They're… fine. They’re the very epitome of fine: if there was a Platonic form for a drawer-pull, it would be this shallowly-rounded button-mushroom of a drawer-pull. It’s also the most boring drawer-pull imaginable. Although what had Horatio envisioned? That people would sit around his bedroom, admiring the perfect absolute rightness of his drawer-pulls? The thought is absurd.  _He_  is absurd. He deliberately swallows back his disappointment: Eneryda is perfectly satisfactory, far better than many options on the display. Which is the point of satisficing. Which is what he had promised Will he would do. It’s fine.

But Will is still talking. “I’ll stop by the chandlery tomorrow and pick up some cordage, cover them in Turksheads.” Will rubs his thumb over the rounded face of the pull, and Horatio can suddenly see what Will sees: the unutterable boringness of the Eneryda makes it a perfect substrate for Will’s fancywork. That plain button shape would be lovely when re-rendered in the woven cross-hatching of a pineapple knot.

It would also be a significant amount of work. “I need eight,” Horatio blurts, in an effort to warn Will off.

Will only fishes up three more packets. He drops all four in the enormous yellow bag over Horatio’s shoulder. Horatio flushes with embarrassment: of course Will heard that as a request, not a demurral.

“I didn’t mean—”

But Will only smiles at him, his eyes crinkling in affection. He pecks a kiss to Horatio’s cheek. “Call it a birthday present if you wish. And it’ll be faster than watching you choose. All the options were terrible anyway.”

“Thank you,” Horatio says, the words feeling stiff and inadequate. He wishes he had Will’s grace, the ability to make a simple gift of himself. To be the boyfriend Will actually deserves.

Will squeezes his hand. “Think you can make it through the rest of the market hall? I’ll buy you an ice-cream at the end.”

Horatio feels a tangled flash of emotion — chagrin that he’s being managed like a child, and pleasure that Will likes him so well despite all his faults, the chief among them his inability to choose a simple drawer pull like a reasonable adult. “I don’t want an ice cream,” he says, even though he very much does. Or less the ice cream itself: he just wants to be spoiled by Will. It shames him to admit how desperately he wants to be spoiled by Will.

Will just slides him a knowing smile, and tugs at his hand. “I’ll let you have a lick of mine, then,” he says, and leads Horatio back onto the path.


	3. Rings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> @lt-williambush prompted "Hornblower buying Bush a birthday present"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [on tumblr](https://sanguinarysanguinity.tumblr.com/post/183898345723/lt-williambush-requested-on-discord-hornblower).

It’s not until the candles are blown out and Horatio slides the little box across the table and sees Will’s reaction — Will’s eyebrows go up in surprise, then draw together into a crinkle of perplexity — that Horatio realises what he’s done.  _Idiot, idiot,_  he chides himself. He usually overthinks everything; he’s embarrassed that he didn’t see in advance how this would look. A ring box has  _connotations_ , after all, and he hadn’t meant that at all.

(It’s not that he doesn’t want  _that:_  he mostly just doesn’t dare think about it, for fear of jinxing the future. The universe has a way of sensing  _want_  and crushing it, so it’s only in a moments of weakness, alone and private when he won’t be overheard, that he lets himself think about  _that._ About a future with Will.)

But Will takes the box, and with an inquiring look at Horatio, raises the lid. Horatio knows what Will sees there: a broad silver band with a raised Celtic knot twining around its length, silver against black. Just ambiguous enough to allow _connotations,_ damnit. Will’s look of puzzlement only intensifies, and he looks up at Horatio for clarification.

“It made me think of you. The knotwork, it’s like one of your Turksheads. And it's… I like your hands,” Horatio blurts. Will’s hands are square and strong, and beautifully competent. They’re beautiful the way only something well-used can be beautiful. Horatio had seen the ring and thought— 

Well, it doesn’t much matter now what he thought.

But Will’s expression clears; it’s the smile he uses when he thinks Horatio is  _endearing_  instead of the more accurate  _ridiculous_. “I like your hands, too,” he says. And then, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world, “I like you.”

And that’s the wondrous thing: Will really does.

Others have loved Horatio before. He’s not particularly good-looking, but there’s a slightness to his gangly frame that, especially when he was younger, was attractive to a certain kind of man. They would freely declare they loved Horatio, and would act thereafter as if they had bestowed a rare gift upon him. But ‘love’ always seemed to be taken for free license for frustration and anger, betrayal that Horatio wasn’t other than he was, a demand that he not be…  _like that._  Love was entirely overrated as far as Horatio was concerned. The misery of it was clear enough in film and literature — even, he understood, in popular song — and why people didn’t take their cue from all that, Horatio didn’t know.

And then Will came along — decent, steady Will, who smiles with secret pleasure when Horatio is _like that_  — and Horatio was unmoored by the surprise of it. Horatio doesn’t understand in the least why Will likes him, but he would never give him the insult to his face of implying that he was mistaken to do so. Because the fact of it is that Will  _does_  like him; that is plain enough to see.

And Horatio thirsts for Will’s easy regard with a need that almost terrifies him. He can’t bring himself to trust Will’s affection — any day now Will will realise who Horatio really is, and it will all come to a crashing end — but in the meanwhile, Horatio is taking it for everything he can get.

“I like you, too,” Horatio says, stiff with the inadequacy of it.

Will flashes him a warm, pleased smile — Horatio hates how much he’s in thrall to that smile — and removes the ring from the box. He begins trying it on the fingers of his right hand, and Horatio breathes a little easier that there’s been no hurt feelings about  _connotations_. He eventually settles on the middle finger. 

It looks well on him.

“It’s a good-looking ring. Almost makes these hands worth looking at,” Will says, and Horatio feels a flash of irritation. Will’s hands are beautiful; that’s the whole point of the ring.

But Will screws the ring off his finger again. He marks a spot with his fingernail, then begins counting pattern repetitions around the circumference. “Three leads, ten bights,” he says to himself. “I never thought of making a ring, although of course you could. It’d wear terribly, though. Although maybe in silver wire? But without the friction…” Will continues to talk to himself, planning out how he might re-create the ring’s knotwork in earnest, and Horatio is well-pleased with himself: the gift had come out right after all, despite the shaky beginning.

“Would you—?” Will says, looking up at Horatio, before he cuts himself off abruptly. There’s a sudden uncertainty in his expression.

“Would I what?”

Will’s mouth twists, not quite a smile. His glance slides away. Horatio waits.

“If I were to re-create this, would you…? Wear it. We could match,” he adds, and the shyness in the last makes Horatio’s heart swell. Of course Horatio wants Will’s ring; he’s greedy at the very thought of it. Matching rings — but not so matchy that the universe might take notice — and in William’s handiwork, too. He  _wants_  that. And the thought that it might matter enough to Will that he’d feel shy asking for it…

“Yes,” Horatio says, lest there be any misunderstanding. “Yes. I’d wear it with pride.”

Will’s face lights up. “Good,” he says, and snatches up his phone. “You have beautiful hands.”

Horatio actually has ridiculous, spidery hands, but this is only another of Will’s many inexplicable opinions about Horatio. But Will loves Horatio’s hands, and so Horatio reaches out to touch Will’s face with one, because it’s easy enough to make Will happy. Will shuts his eyes in pleasure, turning to nuzzle into Horatio’s hand, to press kisses along the lengths of his fingers. 

Horatio has to kiss him after that.

“Enough,” Will eventually says. “I have to order wire.” As if it isn’t his birthday. As if the day means he has to give gifts to everyone else.

“No, you don’t, you have birthday cake to eat,” Horatio counters, and reaches for the knife.


End file.
